HEDDA GABLER BY HENRIK IBSEN, IMPORTANT POINTS

1.       Cock of the yard - Judge Brack
2.      Triangle is based on mutual understanding - Judge Brack
3.      "people don't shoot their pet rooster" and certainly not their cock of the walk.
4.      Hedda Gabler - i'm burning you child
5.      Hedda seems to be extremely angry people calling books and words as child and as something really important than a human
6.      Childish happy -- Tesman seems to be -- when Hedda Gabler tells him that he has burnt Eilert manuscript for his sake.
7.      Hedda "at last such beauty" "Eilert had the courage to do one right thing"
8.      Then hedda regrets doing that
9.      "everything i touch becomes ludicrous and despicable" - Hedda says that, when Judge Brack tells Hedda that the pistol in Eilert pocket accidentally went off
10.  "no longer free, not free, i can't bear that though" - when judge tells that he recognizes the picture
11.  George Tesman - concerned about his studies, his family, aunt julie, aunt rina and money
12.  Aunt Julie - concerned about george, misses him
13.  Berta - diligent servant, always trying to please
14.  Judge Brack - flirtious - cock
15.  Elvsted lovborg - drunkard genius, now sober but in trouble
16.  Hedda Tesman - vine leaves ; Dinoysian self (god of merrry making and wine)- aristocrat, pregnant, unhappy with life - cannot get what she needs from Tesman - her material desires Tesman cannot fulfill,

CHARACTERISTICS OF 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL

Characteristics of 20th century American Novel

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20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL

The turn of the century saw a wide array of events and developments -periods of prosperity and depression, a Great War, transformation in the lives of Black Americans, urban chaos, revolutionary technology, emergence of the "new woman" as protagonist and writer-changed society. But they also changed fiction by deepening the alienation and the fascination writers experienced as they confronted the nation's changing scene. Novelists became more self conscious, self absorbed, and self referential. They changed the novel's regular form for experimental forms of flux, perplexity, openness, skepticism, freedom, and horror. They replaced omniscience with fixed or fallible perspectives, broke their chapters into fragments, and dissolved their sentences into the streams and flows of interior psychic life. Time and space dissolved and the moderns went as far as to question reality itself. Intellectual currents particularly Freudian psychology and Marxism contributed to the breakdown of traditional values. These views fired the imagination of young writers.

   Modernity favoured "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent", and fascination with these things meant making fiction more dynamic and variable. Faster, fragmentary writing could not only make fiction feel more like itself, but also encourage the sort of nimble thoughts and feelings readers might need to thrive amid modernity's chaotic effects.

   The writers began to doubt their judgments and their senses, making doubt perhaps the dominant mood of modern fiction. A world constantly in flux was one in which nothing could be certain. It demanded constant recognition of human fallibility and failure.  

   Skepticism often dwells upon the gap between appearances and reality. Modern novelists frequently discover deeply ironic or even ruinous differences between the way things seem and what proves true about them. Appearances reverse realities. Impressions and presuppositions exist to be corrected or defied; truths and realities retreat to story's end, or beyond. To try for truth, modern writers frequently come at it from different perspectives. Another key feature of the modern novel is its sense that truth and meaning vary with point of view. Things appear differently to different people, and the modern novel therefore, tends to vary its perspectives. Sufficient representation demands many tellings, and the full story comes out only as alternative versions present its different sides. Modern novels deal in no absolutes- moral, perceptual, or cultural. Rather, they make truth to be a relative thing, reliant upon circumstances, changing with time and place. 

   Traditional narration conducted with the objective impersonality had come to seem unrealistic, or at least ineffective in conveying the reality of limited human experience and knowledge. By contrast, the subjective narrative, usually aligned with some particular character's point of view, became the only way to achieve narrative credibility. Depending on the temperament of the writer in question or the mood of the story, this stress on subjective experience could be negative or positive. 

   "Consciousness" is the modern novels signature field of play and became fully elaborate in Henry James's psychological novels. Writers bombarded consciousness with sensory impressions of changing objects and scenes that overlapped. Character lost coherence as a result: unified selves fragmented into such a jumble of perceptions, motives, memories, and desires that fictional people ceased to have the fixed, standard "qualities" that had made them engaging and memorable in the novels of the past. Lost within their own mental fluctuation, they ceased strong engagement with the outside world. In modern novel, accurate characterization became a matter of plumbing new depths of idiosyncrasy and confusion; plot turned now on decisions, realizations, and reflections that were more minute and diverse.

   The early twentieth century novelists tried to make fiction more true to the heterogeneity of human temporality. They also tried to make it more true to the vagaries of human memory. Just as the passing of time had come to seem more irregular, the past had come to seem more elusive, in contrast to what familiar stories and records implied about its easy accessibility. The past therefore, appears in modern novels as something to be discovered only haphazardly, imperfectly, and through much effort.

   Novelists were determined no longer to preach or to allow the art of fiction to pass into moral argument; they traded ethical priorities for aesthetic ones, and made realism more typical than any preference for good over evil. Moral certainties became unavailable as the ambiguity of human motivation, the relative nature of goodness, and even the savagery of human appetites would have the last word.  

   Even despite the despair and irony that often characterizes modern fiction; it often has an idealistic wish to find new forms of salvation. In some accounts, the modern novel occupies a critical moment of faith in art's powers of redemption. Novelists took aesthetic experiment to new heights, in the hope that doing so could yet reform or redeem culture.

   Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young Americans of the 1920's were "the lost generation"-so named by the American writer Gertrude Stein. Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity. The sense of the world still at war, or at least deeply wounded by the war, hovers over the fiction of the twenties. Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation.

   Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the novel. The way the story was told became as important as the story itself. Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with fictional points of view. Henry James often restricted the information in the novel to what a single character would have known. Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character.

   The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920's and 1930's. Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O'Neill repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.  

   During the 1920's, Harlem, the black community situated in New York City, sparkled with passion and creativity. The sounds of its Black American Jazz swept the United States by a storm. Carl Van Vechten's sympathetic 1926 novel of Harlem gives some idea of the complex and bitter sweet life of black America in the face of economic and social inequality. In the 1930's, novels portrayed concern for the welfare of the common citizen and their focus was on groups of people, professions, families and urban masses. 

   Novels written during World War II reflect little social interest. Americans had turned from domestic problems to a struggle for survival. What most readers wanted was escape-writing. There were novels that attempted to deal with the impact of the war on men so recently civilians, but this fiction is largely autobiographical. 

   In the past, elite culture influenced popular culture through its status and example; the reverse seems true in United States today. Serious novelists such as Alice Walker, Thomas Pynchon, and E.L. Doctorow have borrowed from and commented on comics, movies, fashions, songs, and oral history. Writers have become more innovative and self-aware. Often they find traditional modes ineffective and seek vitality in more widely popular material. Fiction in the second half of the 20^th century reflects the character of each decade. The late 1940's saw the aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. Writers like Norman Mailer and James Jones employed realism verging on grim naturalism; both took pains not to glorify combat. Later, Joseph Heller cast World War II in satirical and absurdist terms, arguing that war is laced with insanity. In 1940's novelists explored the fate of the individual within the family or community and focused on the balance between personal growth and responsibility to the group.

   Loneliness was a dominant theme in the 1950's. The faceless corporate man became a cultural stereotype in Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel The Man in the Flannel Suit (1955). General American alienation came under scrutiny of David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950). Most of the works of 1950's supported the assumption that all Americans shared a common lifestyle. They criticized citizens for losing their individualism and becoming too conformist. The 1950's was actually a decade of subtle and pervasive stress. Novels by John O'Hara, John Cheever, and John Updike explore the stress lurking in the shadows of seeming satisfaction. Some of the best work portrays men who fail in the struggles to succeed, as in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. O'Hara wrote about outwardly successful people whose inner faults and dissatisfaction leaves them vulnerable.

   The alienation and stress underlying the 1950's found outward expression in the 1960's in the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, antiwar protests, and minority activism. The 1960's was marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage that has carried through the present day. An ironic, comic vision also came into view, reflected in the works of several writers. Examples include Ken Kesey's darkly comic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel about life in a mental hospital in which wardens are more disturbed than the inmates. The comical and fantastic yielded a new mode, half comic and half metaphysical. 

   In the 1980's-the "Me Decade"- ensued, in which individuals tended to focus more on personal concerns than on larger social issues. In literature, old currents remained, but the force behind pure experimentation dwindled. New novelists like John Gardner and Alice Walker surfaced with stylistically brilliant novels to portray moving human dramas. Concern with setting, character, and themes associated with realism returned. Realism was employed often mingled with bold original elements, for example, a daring structure like a novel within a novel. The close of the 1980's and the beginning of 1990s saw minority literature flourish.

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

   Melville's imagination originates in his powerful sense of the irrationality and contradictoriness of experience. The language and metaphor of Shakespeare make themselves strongly felt in his novel Moby-Dick. The travelogue-novel contributes to the realism employed by the 20^th century fiction. In discussing allegory and symbol, Moby-Dick is in one sense a symbolist poem. It also contains strong melodramatic, if not fully tragic elements.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

   He is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called "The Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Twain wrote about the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind. He combined rich humour, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

   Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made man. He captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920's; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American youth. The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times. His special style includes a dazzling style perfectly suited to his theme of seductive glamour.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

   He is one of the most popular American novelists of this century. His simple style makes his novels easy to comprehend, and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the "cult of experience", Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their inner natures. He wrote of war, death and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned. His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses understatement. He uses simple words in economical ways. He treats language as a tool and calls attention to new ways of using familiar words. His best novels include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

   An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly with narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich and demanding style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate parts. The best of his novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932). Most of these novels use different characters to tell parts of the story and demonstrate how meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the subject at hand. Each novel reflects upon itself, while it simultaneously unfolds a story of universal interest. His themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love. He employed Freudian elements in all his works. 

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

   His incisive presentation of American life and his criticism of American materialism, narrowness and hypocrisy brought him national and international recognition. In 1930, He became the first American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. Lewis's major novels include Babbitt(1922). The novel added a new word to the American language-"babbitry", meaning narrow-minded, complacent, bourgeois ways.

John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

   Dos Passos wrote more realistically, in line with the doctrine of socialist realism. His best work achieves a scientific objectivism and almost documentary effect. He developed an experimental collage technique for his masterwork U.S.A., consisting of The 42^nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). His techniques included "newsreel" sections taken from cotemporary headlines, popular songs, and advertisements, as well as "biographies" briefly setting forth the lives of important Americans of the period. Both the newsreels and biographies lend Dos Passos's novels a documentary value. A third technique, the "camera eye", consists of stream of consciousness prose poems that offer a subjective response to the events described in the books. 

John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

   Steinbeck is a liberal American writer noted for his social criticism. His best work is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Other Works include Of Mice and Men (1937), Cannery Row (1945), and East of Eden (1952). Steinbeck combines realism with romanticism that finds virtue in poor farmers who live close to the land. His fiction demonstrates the vulnerability of such people, who can be uprooted by droughts and are the first to suffer in periods of political unrest and economic depression. 

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

   Wright was the first African-American novelist to reach a general audience. His outspoken writing blazed a path for subsequent African –American novelists. His novel Native Son (1940) was a necessary and overdue expression of the racial inequality that has been the subject of so much debate in the United States. 

Norman Mailer (1932- )

   He is generally considered the representative author of recent decades, able to change his style and subject many times. His ideas are bold and innovative. In his appetite for experience, vigorous style, and dramatic public persona, he follows in the tradition of Hemingway. His great works include novels Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot's Ghost (1992). 

John Gardner (1933-1982)

   John Gardner used a realistic approach but employed innovative techniques-such as flashbacks, stories within stories, retellings of myths, and contrasting stories- to bring out the truth of a human situation. His strengths are characterization and colorful style. Major works include The Resurrection (1966) and October Light (1976). 

Toni Morrison (1931-)

   An African-America novelist, her richly woven fiction has gained her international acclaim. In compelling, large-spirited novels, she treats the complex identities of black people in a universal manner.

Alice Walker (1944-)

   A "womanist" writer, as Walker calls herself, she has long been associated with feminism, presenting black existence from the female perspective. She uses heightened lyrical realism to centre on the dreams and failures of accessible, credible people. Her work underscores the quest for dignity in human life. Her work seeks to educate. The Color Purple is one of her finest works.

Contributed by alias used: A nice enough individual, willing to contribute, Sarah Terry M.

HISTORY OF IRELAND - list of essential links

History of Ireland
This article is part of a series
Chronology
Prehistory
400–800
800–1169
1169–1536
1536–1691
1691–1801
1801–1923
Peoples and polities
Hibernia and Roman Empire
Gaelic Ireland
Lordship of Ireland
Kingdom of Ireland
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Republic of Ireland · Northern Ireland
Topics
Battles · Clans · Kingdoms · States
Gaelic monarchs · British monarchs
Economic history · History of the Irish language

HISTORY OF IRELAND

The first known settlement in Ireland began around 8000 BC, when hunter-gatherers arrived from continental Europe, probably via a land bridge.^[1] Few archaeological traces remain of this group, but their descendants and later Neolithic arrivals, particularly from the Iberian Peninsula, were responsible for major Neolithic sites such as Newgrange.^[2][3] On the arrival of Saint Patrick and other Christian missionaries in the early to mid-5th century AD, Christianity began to subsume the indigenous Celtic religion, a process that was completed by the year 600.

MODERNITY

Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, in particular, one marked by the move from feudalism (or agrarianism) toward capitalism, industrialisation, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance (Barker 2005, 444).

EXPRESSIVE REALISM

Source : http://www.blurtit.com/q231653.html

Expressive Realism means, reality as expressed by the author. As it is an expressed reality, so there can be various versions for it...As Virginia Woolf puts it in her novel "To the Lighthouse", "nothing was simply one thing".

On a general note, or in my words, Realism is basically a movement in literature, arts and architecture in which the creator depicts reality as it is without his own interpretation. His version of depiction may very well be his own, but the idea and the mindset of the artist is to portray the thing or object the way it is without a brush stroke of his own judgement. In other words the artist is copying the created object.

IDEALISM

The act or practice of envisioning things in an ideal form. In Philosophy The theory that the object of external perception, in itself or as perceived, consists of ideas.

PERCEPTIONS: OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY

If you believe in religion being objective then you must believe that you are taking subjectivity ( digesting things subjectively in your own way).

So, religion stays religion, but every religion is dependent on our perceptions. You will perceive a moving train differently when you are standing at a higher platform, you'll see the train as an oblong and when you are standing and the train is static as well, you will perceive it as a rectangle.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Let me see it on google.

Here are two excerpts from perkel.com

"Isaac Newton was our first scientists to dabble in relativity (not Einstein relativity) in that he discovered that speed and distance traveled were dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. For example, if you are on a train and you roll a ball in the same direction the train is moving at a speed of 5 feet per second, you will observe the ball moving 5 feet in one second. Suppose however that the train is moving down the tracks at 10 feet per second. A person standing next to the tracks will observe the ball moving at 15 feet per second and traveling 15 feet in the same one second. So who's right? The both are, but from their own frame of reference."

"According to relativity, there is no such thing as absolute space and absolute speed. If these things don't exist, then there can never be a way to measure any changes caused by speed. If relative space and time don't exist, then it is necessary that the laws of physics appear to be identical to all moving observers so that you can't measure something that doesn't exist. If you can measure something, then it's real. For something to not be real requires that it can't be measured. Thus in order for absolute space and speed to be not real means that no measurable changes can occur that would allow you to calculate it. Thus the concept of the laws of physics appearing the same and the lack of absolute space and speed are linked. Relativity depends on the lack of absolute references."


And perceptions are deceiving.

ITALIAN AND ENGLISH SONNET

Sonnet: The sonnet is typically comprised of fourteen lines in a
strict rhyming scheme. There are two common rhyming patterns used in the sonnet - the Italian
pattern and the English pattern. The Italian pattern is rhymed in the
pattern abba abba cdcdcd, while the English pattern is rhymed abab
cdcd efef gg.

TONI MORRISON AND WRITERS LIKE HER

Afro-American writer, an activist, Toni Morrison has authored nine novels in total. Let me see wikipedia for it. Okay! copied from wikipedia these list of books. Here is the list of six books.

Novels : Six Novels, I am presenting the facts, that I want to share, which I think everyone should remember (apart from every other thing in the novel)

• The Bluest Eye (1970; ISBN 0-452-28706-5)

Ok! I am adding the description of all of the novels. Then, again my source is wikipedia, which is not appreciated by critics or anyone from literary background or knowledge. Forget about this. Let me write something.

Ok! the novel is based on the perspective of Claudia MacTeer as a child and as an adult on  racism, incest, and child molestation.

• Sula (1974; ISBN 1-4000-3343-8)

1. Sula Peace: the main protagonist, who affects the whole town of Medallion with her return.

• Song of Solomon (1977; ISBN 1-4000-3342-X)

1. The main theme in the novel is Milkman's quest for identity as a black man in the 20th-century United States, as he slowly tries to piece together the history of his ancestors. He does this by taking a journey into his father and aunt's past, searching for origins.
2. The main character, Macon "Milkman" Dead III, derives his nickname from the fact that he was breastfed for far too long.

• Tar Baby (1981; ISBN 1-4000-3344-6)

1. Love affair.
2. The struggle of Jadine and Son reveals the pain, struggle, and compromises confronting Black Americans seeking to live and love with integrity in the United States.

• Beloved (1987; ISBN 1-4000-3341-1)

Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner,

Major Themes:

1. Mother-daughter relationships
2. Psychological impact of slavery

• Jazz (1992; ISBN 1-4000-7621-8)

1. The novel deliberately mirrors the music of its title, with various characters "improvising" solo compositions that fit together late a whole work.
2. One of the main themes of the novel is purgatory and the cathartic ability of Jazz music.

Major themes according to gradesaver.com: Youth Vs. Age, Music and Memory

http://www.gradesaver.com/jazz/study-guide/major-themes/

Sorry, I didn't give you examples because I can't write now. Thankyou.

• Paradise (1999; ISBN 0-679-43374-0)

1. The novel tells the story of the tension between the men of Ruby, Oklahoma (an all-black town^[2] founded in 1950) and a group of women who lived in a former convent seventeen miles away.

• Love (2003; ISBN 0-375-40944-0)

1. Love is the story of Bill Cosey, a charismatic but dead hotel owner. Or rather, it is about the people around him, all affected by his life — even long after his death.

• A Mercy (2008; ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7)

1. A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery in early America. It is both the story of mothers and daughters and the story of a primitive America.

Source: Wikipedia : Shortcut link/ Image Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_mercy_cover.jpg

Interviews, Discussion direct with or on the Author: Toni Morrison 

An Evening with Toni Morrison: On Fora.tv

Download Links:

Audio: http://fora.tv/fora/fora_download?cid=8221&fid=19509

Video: http://fora.tv/fora/fora_download?cid=8221&fid=19508

Conversation with Charlie Rose:

Charlie Rose - MORRISON

59:05 - 4 years ago

Toni Morrison, Author, "Paradise" [Alfred A. Knopf] clips: Charlie Rose 2/24/97, 5/7/93

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2790851242454573240#

Charlie Rose - MORRISON (FROM 11/21/03) / LAHIRI (FROM 10/29/03)

58:08 - 4 years ago

Toni Morrison, Author, "Love" [Knopf] /// Jhumpa Lahiri, Author, "The Namesake" [Houghton Mifflin]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2790851242454573240#docid=4313266071427505573

_______________________________________________________________

Podcast of Toni Morrison discussing Beloved on the BBC's World Book Club